Only yesterday Nelson
Mandela, Richard Lugar, and the
Russian foreign minister joined
Kofi Annan, Gerhard Schroeder,
Dick Armey, Brent Scowcroft,
Oprah, Phil Donahue and the
editorial board of the New York
Times to demand that the
president stand down from his
confrontation with Saddam
Hussein.

Nelson Mandela is "appalled,"
Sen. Lugar wants to "re-energize"
our European allies (though
nothing short of goat-gland
transplants are likely to restore them to robust manhood).
The Russians, who are selling the Iraqis all manner of
sophisticated machinery of mass destruction, can't find a
"single well-founded argument" that Saddam is a threat to the
United States.

The Alfred E. Neuman refrain is that America's salvation
lies with the United Nations, that Saddam Hussein's mustard
gas and anthrax and dirty bombs are no match for the
resolution (and the resolutions) of the distinguished delegates
of the General Assembly. If a dirty bomb fries half of
Manhattan, well, that's a risk the courageous statesmen from
Upper Volta, Equitorial Guinea, and Lower Slobbovia are
willing to take.

George W. invited this, perhaps as the great debate that
everyone says we must have, by sending out surrogates (Don
Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney) to make
arguments for "regime change" on Monday and then sending
out others (Ari Fleischer, Colin Powell) on Tuesday to say
"nah, don't pay any attention to them."

By encouraging the Nervous Nellies and Fearful Fannies
to hyperventilate now, the president can't be credibly accused
when the shooting starts of having not listened to his critics.
By then the critics will be pushing each other out of the way
to grab a pom-pon, try a cartwheel and join the cheer-leading
squad. Hillary Clinton will be shouting the hurrahs the loudest.

But what if George W. does the usual Republican turn,
and climbs meekly down from the confrontation he so
carefully set up and nurtured for the months since September
11? Wouldn't this give Saddam Hussein the triumph he
craves, avenging the humiliation of the Gulf war and making
him the master of the Arab world, revealing George W. to be
the champ of chumps, the wussy of the West and the
standard by which presidential wussyhood would be forever
judged?

That's why it can't be allowed to happen. But the
president has only himself to blame if the debate seems to be
getting a little out of hand. The Iraqis are engaged in a
diplomatic offensive, in Europe and Africa, and our own
secretary of state gives comfort if not aid to Saddam's
surrogates. Some of the criticism of the administration's war
plans at home verges close to scorn of the president. George
W. allows this to grow at his peril.

When Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine general who is an
adviser to the secretary of state, lobbed a remarkably nasty
insult at the president, the vice president and the secretary of
defense, sneering that war planners who had "never fired a
shot in anger" should leave the war planning to the generals,
there was no rebuke, either of Mr. Zinni or of Colin Powell,
who let the remarks go unchallenged.

Mr. Zinni made the fool only of himself, and demonstrated
once more why the Founding Fathers prescribed stringent
civilian control of the military. Mr. Zinni would have excluded
Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson from the War
Room during three of the great wars of the 20th century. We
can only imagine how swiftly old soldier Harry Truman would
have dealt with such insolence. It was George W.'s rival from
the 2000 campaign, John McCain (more intimately
acquainted with the brutality of war than Anthony Zinni, his
brass and braid notwithstanding), who reminded Mr. Zinni of
Clemenceau's famous admonition that "war is too important
to be left to the generals."

If all this is part of the set-up of his critics, George W. will
be entitled to a hearty private chortle. But it has become
apparent to everyone that the tide that rose with the stunning
military success in Afghanistan has ebbed dramatically. This,
too, has been largely of the president's making. He called it a
war on terror, but it's so far more skirmish than struggle,
fought largely through harassing action against elderly ladies at
the nation's airports, and there's so much official fraternizing
with the enemy that it's difficult for the rest of us to
understand who we're supposed to be at war against.

Sixty-three years ago this morning Hitler's jackbooted
legion continued the march through Poland in the first week of
World War II. His generals took with them a commission
from der Fuehrer that echoes in Saddam Hussein's Iraq: "Act
with brutality, and close your hearts to pity." And now
September 11 approaches, and soon we'll be locked in an
observance of an anniversary that is likely, given the media's
gift for empty and sudsy sentiment, to become a wallow in
tears and treacle, the easy substitute for the grit and gristle
necessary to fight a war against emboldened evil.

We're about to see whether George W. Bush is the
master strategist, the pol with the unerring moves, or the
master chump, destined to join his daddy as the dynamic duo
of history's could-have-beens.